Title: Keeping the Balance
Author: sun_and_rain
Rating: PG-13
Warning: deals with issues of consent, homophobia, and memory loss
Summary: They met up once a week, to gather stories and fragments of memories like puzzle pieces. No one recognized the name when Kurt first spoke it–a name he'd found buried somewhere in his dreams–but he couldn't shake the feeling that it was important: "Blaine". Whatever had been taken from them had something to do with Blaine.


A/N: Gasp! A Blaine POVin a Left Over chapter? Yes. He tugged my sleeve and told me he wanted to talk, so I let him. Huzzah! We'll be alternating between him and Kurt for a lot of the fic, just as a warning. Hope you enjoy!


Chapter Two: The Difference Between An Inconvenience and A Problem


He told himself to stop pacing, but he knew his feet wouldn't stop moving even if he wanted them to. With seventy square feet of empty room to traverse at his leisure there wasn't much else to do. He could pretend that the pacing was using up energy he would prefer to be applying toward much more useful pursuits (such as traveling in his dreams, or punching Andrew in the face, or murdering Wes Montgomery in a slow and painful manner), but the growing heat of his skin would beg otherwise. Jesus, he felt like he was in a volcano.

He breathed in through his nose, cricked his neck, shook out his arms. Pacing, pacing, pacing. Not for the first time, his eyes darted over to the dried plants and herbs hanging in the mockingly open entryway.

I have many skills, but opening locked doors is not one of them, he remembered saying to Flint once (or something like that). How kind of Erickson to ensure that his proficiency with picking locks was no longer an issue, with his doorway that was conspicuously missing an actual door. Freedom gaped long and narrow out from it, down a dusky hallway that he could see every inch of.

He saw when they came. He saw when they left. He saw the window at the very end of the hallway, open and unlocked and staring back at him whenever he deemed to glance at it.

He wanted a fucking door.

Breathing out heavily, he picked up the pace. What he wouldn't give for some water. His head tilted back on a forward step, and his eyes closed and he pretended he was somewhere else.

A glimpse of Kurt: the image gauzy in streaming daylight, sitting in class. He was drawing in a language he didn't recognize as a language, sketching symbols he thought were only doodles during a teacher's boring lecture. He wanted to reach out, cry out, tell him what the symbols meant (find me, please, I love you, you're dying)—

His head snapped up and he lost his balance, veering sideway to bang into the wall and he stilled, for seconds, minutes. It was too hot to move.

Stop using it, he told himself, even though he knew he wouldn't. He paced again, wearing out the floor, the soles of his feet. He could still feel them all up here, he could feel them so loudly up here, and he didn't know if it was because Andrew had told him he could or because there were so many of them that he couldn't ignore it, but they overfilled him and it sparked from his fingers. He remembered learning about the human body, back when he was allowed to learn things like a normal child; that it was made up of 70% water and yet a human could drown by drinking too much.

He moved faster, feeling faint and a little nauseous as the mass of downstairs emotion fogged his brain and welled up inside of him, and wondered if the same applied to magic.

Erickson clearly didn't think so.

Stop thinking about it.

He stumbled into the corner of the room and almost let himself sink down to the ground. He blinked hard and pushed against the wall to get him moving again. He was still too warm. He needed to keep moving, burn it off.

He licked his lips unconsciously and glanced out the open doorway. There was a bed and a heavy comforter in the corner of the room—a discarded sweater, socks, a long-sleeve shirt—he had stripped down to his undershirt and kept the jeans (Kurt's jeans), stopped using the bed (he didn't remember in how long, it was so hard to tell the passage of time here). He was still hot. Andrew was going to come up soon, water and food and daggers of unwanted emotions coming up with him.

The water would help, but maybe he should try not eating. Hurt himself. Something to use up all the heat building inside of him, let him feel normal again (hide the fork that comes with his food and scratch his skin, let the heat bleed out).

He tripped, catching himself on the stone floor.

His legs didn't work as well as they had when he had begun the pacing, and he knew that wasn't a good sign, but he didn't know what to do about it. One day, he was going to wake up and not be able to move them at all anymore.

He breathed slowly, staring down at the floor and staying on his hands and knees.

He closed his eyes and thought of Kurt. Pastel watercolors of Kurt in the choir room bloomed inside his eyelids. Kurt, singing in front the glee club and beautiful, angelic, stubborn. He walked out of the room without wanting to, following a hallway, and then Rachel was walking past him and they were in his middle school, and she passed him and they locked eyes, briefly, and abruptly everything was painful, his heart hurt, so much he couldn't keep walking and he knew, he knew, he knew he had to stop her before—

She cut off, all of it cut off, and he jolted as his eyes snapped open with a gasp and all of his muscles tensed on the ground as panic shuddered through him. Wait, what, wait, had that been downstairs, had someone—? He shoved his head into the crook of his elbow, focusing on the mass of confusion downstairs, listening, opening, feeling…

Something gripped his heart-a stranger's thrill of doing something he knew he shouldn't. It was a different taste than Andrew's feelings, slightly less bitter on the tongue. And it was coming closer.

Oh, he's new.

He collapsed sideways onto the floor, the stone not-quite-cold against his skin. He stared as the source of the foreign emotions entered the room, a new kid he'd never seen before, ducking under the dried, cracking herbs to cross over the threshold of the door. The slow burn of attraction hit his stomach, vague enough that it was easy to tell it came from the kid and not him. He watched the new kid crouch down in front of him.

"Do me a favor?" he asked, his voice sounding over-loud in the stillness of the room.

The kid smirked a little. "Whatever you want," he said.

"Check to make sure no one just tried to kill themselves. Then come back and tell me."

The smirk dropped, and the owner of it stared at him seriously. "I'm not supposed to be up here," he said.

"I gathered." Amusement and pride swelled in his chest (not his). "What's your name?"

"Sebastian."

He looked out the doorway, spotting the window at the end of the corridor.

"Do you have a favorite bird, Sebastian?" he asked, the blue-grey glimmer of sky staring back at him.

"Sure," Sebastian answered easily. "I've always been a fan of warblers."

A smile twitched his lips and he turned back to look at Sebastian. "You shouldn't be up here," he said lowly, fighting a grin.

Sebastian had no such qualms. "Yeah, well. I rarely do what I'm told," he showed his teeth.

Possibility and hope and a nervous delight sent a tremble through his limbs.

"Hanging on the floor?" Sebastian settled down fully from his crouched position, sitting calmly on the ground. "You're not cold?"

"No. I like it better on the floor than on the bed."

"That so?" Arousal shot straight through to his groin, strong enough that it took him a few seconds to recognize it had come from Sebastian.

His skin started burning. He had been still for too long. He had to start moving again.

Or maybe.

His eyes sketched out Sebastian's outline, coming to rest back at green eyes that seemed to know what he was thinking.

"Do me one more favor?"

Sebastian's eyes glittered and a powerful wave of anticipation hit him. He took it in quietly, filing away the tremor of wariness at the pit of his stomach.

"Go ahead," Sebastian said, a slight breathlessness taming some of the cockiness in his voice.

His fingers flexed, and he moved his right hand forward: open and beckoning.

Sebastian licked his lips and took a breath. Hunger.

The fingers slid almost sensually down his palm, lacing together with his own as they held hands.

"Think of something good," he said, still locked in Sebastian's eyes.

Sebastian breathed in and—

It rushed through him, out of him, up his arm and through his hand and out, out, finally, out! His head snapped back and he couldn't stop his body from arching toward Sebastian, a gasp escaping him as liquid painpleasure tugged through his body and the relief of letting it go, having it leave, be released overpowered the sharp, nauseous defiance of his body rebelling against the intruding presence that gripped his heart and wrenched the heat out of him.

It hurt as much as it stimulated every nerve in his body and he didn't know (he never knew) if he was going to scream in pain or moan in ecstasy as he opened his mouth to try to breathe through it.

It was over too soon (not soon enough) and his eyelids fluttered as he snatched his hand back and away from Sebastian's.

As soon as he let go, the nausea won over. He flopped onto his back to try to stop himself from throwing up, feeling heavy and immovable. He hated it.

But the floor was cold.

He was cold.

Again.

Finally.

"Thank you," he said softly, closing his eyes in relief.

"Any time," Sebastian replied. He let shivers run up his body as he heard Sebastian get up. "Do you want the blanket?" Sebastian's voice drifted over him.

"No," he replied calmly. If he stayed cold, he could see Kurt again tonight. He wouldn't have to worry about drowning. "Tell me about the suicide," he said as he felt Sebastian settle something down next to him.

"No suicide," Sebastian said. "I don't know why you thought there was."

"Felt it," he murmured, fighting the sleep that weighted him down. "I thought it was Rachel, at first, but it didn't feel like her. It felt like middle school." He felt as Sebastian started to leave, the herbs rustling as he passed under them. "I'm probably going crazy," he whispered.

"I wouldn't be surprised," Sebastian answered back, and he was beyond the door now, he could feel it. "They're pulling some crazy shit with you, killer."

He cracked an eye open and sent Sebastian a smirk. "Yes," he agreed. "That's a way to put it."

Sebastian's gaze was less possessive than Andrew's. Not by much—but Sebastian was the first person he'd seen besides Andrew in weeks. He'd take what he could get.

Swallowing, he risked it: "Any time?"

Sebastian's grin was fox-like.

"Any time," he confirmed.

He watched as the boy left, down the hallway, up to the window, and turning the corner into normality. Gone.

Warily, he looked down at the object Sebastian had left with him.

Roses. Pure, white roses.

"Ha," he breathed softly, picking them up. White for funerals. "Fitting," he murmured, a thrill of morbid humor plucking his heart. "Score one for you."

Maybe he didn't have to keep pacing after all.

Plans formulated like ice crystals in his mind, solidifying too slowly for him to be sure of anything yet. (But it was something.) He hummed, shivering in the cold.

Relaxing into the floor, he closed his eyes and thought of Kurt.